by Carver Pike
“If you follow her into the woods, you better be man enough to deal with her father when he finds out,” Hawks said. “Cause he’ll find out eventually.”
“Should I be nervous?” he asked.
Hawks thought back to his first time making love to Savannah, and how he’d been so excited and nervous that he’d felt like he was going to throw up. Savannah trembled through the entire experience, which due to Hawks’ excitement only lasted about ten seconds.
“Hawks?” Twig said.
Hawks hadn’t realized he’d dazed off and was staring into the fire until he heard the young boy’s voice.
“Well, you’ve never been with a girl before. It’s normal to be nervous.”
For a moment Hawks considered telling the boy about safe sex and then remembered that images couldn’t have children. Diseases they could get, but with most of her life spent in the mountains with her family, Hawks was sure she was a virgin.
“I love her,” Twig said.
“You heard what I said. Be ready to defend yourself and Tania, when her parents find out,” Hawks said again.
“They’re not even her real parents,” Twig argued.
“Tell that to Segundo.”
Twig stood up and looked down at Hawks.
“I’m gonna do it.”
The big smile and the light in his eyes told Hawks there was nothing he could do to convince him otherwise. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Good luck,” he said.
Chapter 3 - Confinement
On the other side of the mirror, the more pleasant side, where the sun still rose each morning, and people, for the most part, were good natured, those who couldn’t obey the rules and laws set by man spent their days locked in iron cells, like caged animals. The prison system was established to protect the innocent folk on the outside from those locked up inside.
Daily chants of “I’m an innocent man” and “You’ve got the wrong guy” were common in all prisons, and most of those stories were true. Innocent men driven to the point of madness and then yanked into the mirror by their evil counterparts happened more often than not. Those evil images ran amuck on the calm side of the mirror, wreaking havoc, raping, robbing, and murdering, only to switch places with their reflections after the evil deed was done, leaving the innocent version of the man stranded and forced to serve the prison sentence for crimes committed by his reflection.
Then, of course, there were those images who were captured by police before having the chance to jump back through the mirror. These were the real villains of the prison system, and these were the real bad sons of bitches, the ones other inmates usually stayed away from. Images looked like normal men for the most part, but if one stared deep into their eyes, a fleck of insanity could be seen floating around in there. Such was the case with Savage Bear. Since the slaughter at the casino, Savage Bear had been incarcerated in the Nevada state prison system.
There, in a small cell in the solitary confinement wing, Savage Bear danced around, spinning a non-existent knife, practicing the blood dance of his people. With a closed fist, and thumb stuck out as if it were a knife blade, Savage Bear grinned as he pretended to slit the throat of his invisible foe. With perfect fluidity he swung the blade from the throat, around past the chest, taking off both nipples, stabbed forward for the gut shot, and then swung down and upward, thrusting the blade into the groin. Every movement of his was well planned and uninterrupted. Stab. Slice. Stab. Thrust. He was a master of his solitary domain.
The slot on his door slid open and the face of the guard appeared.
“75491, your time’s up. You get to go back to your cell.”
“And if I choose to stay here?” Savage Bear asked.
“There is no choice,” the guard replied. “Stop tryin’ to be a hard ass. Everyone wants out of here.”
Savage Bear only grinned.
As the guard marched him out of the solitary wing and down the aisle toward his cell, the other prisoners stared at him. Some of them were familiar with the mirror switch, and had been stranded on the good side of the mirror due to their reflections getting killed on the dark side. That or their reflection’s refusal to come back, a rule that was applied rarely, since most regular people stuck on the dark side want nothing more than to return to their peaceful world.
Savage Bear was a rare breed. Since entering the other side, he’d never tried, not even once, to return to the dark side. He had nothing waiting for him there. He’d murdered everyone in his tribe before switching places with Hawks. Even now, thinking back, he wasn’t sure why he did it. He was filled with a rage, a thirst for blood that never seemed to be quenched. For some reason, being trapped in the prison of iron and cement eased the rage. Not completely, but it eased it nonetheless. When he found the anger creeping up from the pit in his stomach, he’d kill a fellow inmate. That’s what sent him to solitary in the first place. He hadn’t actually killed his cellmate, but the guy wouldn’t be having conjugal visits anytime soon.
Back in his cell, Savage Bear lay on his cot, staring up at the ceiling. He thought about life on the dark side, about women he’d been with. Staring over at his cellmate’s empty cot, he saw the photo of the man’s wife taped to the wall. He tried to remember a single woman who’d meant enough to him that he might consider putting her photo on his wall. No one came to mind.
He contemplated masturbating to the photo, but he was too lazy. That would mean getting up to retrieve it, that or staring at it from where he lay, and the photo was too fuzzy looking from his vantage point. Instead, he decided to sleep.
He was drifting off, making his way into a dream where he was rolling around naked in a pool of blood with three women, when a tapping sound woke him. His eyes opened and focused on the cell door, where he found a large, bald biker with a black beard and tattoos covering every inch of exposed skin standing in the open cell doorway.
“Savage Bear,” the man said.
Savage Bear sat up on his elbows and stared at the man.
“Get out of my cell,” he warned.
“Hey calm down, brutha, I just came to talk. Name’s Hugo.”
“I was dreaming…of titties, twat, and blood,” Savage Bear said angrily. “You don’t wake a man from that.”
“My apologies, brutha.”
“How you know my name?”
“That doesn’t matter. A name means nothing in here. What does matter is a certain request I have, from a very important person.”
Savage Bear didn’t feel like playing games. Obviously this man had something to say to him or he wouldn’t be wasting so much time. So he sat and waited for Hugo to explain himself. And he did.
“I have a request from Shiva, Lord of Bala Nishta.”
Savage Bear laughed under his breath. “Fuck off,” he said. “I no answer to Shiva. I no answer to no one.”
“You answer to Colossus,” Hugo argued.
“No,” Savage Bear said. “Fuck Colossus, too. Here I answer to buzzer. I eat when time to eat, I work out when time come, and I sleep when lights out. That is all. I like this easy life.” He rested on his pillow and closed his eyes.
“Wait! Shiva has much to offer. He’ll make you a hunter of Bala Nishta, with all the benefits. You’ll live like a king. Fuck so many beautiful women, gorge yourself in violence, and have all the drugs you can handle.”
Savage Bear rose up on his elbows once again, then turned and slid off the cot and made his way over to Hugo, who held his hand out for Savage Bear to shake. He slapped it away and stood with his hands on his hips, flexing his strong, bare chest.
“I listen what you have to say,” he said.
“You need to go back,” Hugo informed him. “You’re trusted there. Your other has found himself surrounded by friends, friends who trust him. So they will trust you. You need to kill the baby.”
Savage Bear was confused. What did this man mean? What baby?
Hugo seemed to sense this and tried once more.
“There’s
a baby. A newborn. Right around your old stomping ground. At a campsite in the mountains.”
“Baby? A child on dark side?” Savage Bear asked, still not understanding that it was possible.
“Kill the baby, Savage. That is all. Then go to Shiva and get your reward,” Hugo replied.
Savage Bear stood, contemplating what he was being asked to do. Cross back through the mirror, pretend he was the other version of himself in order to get close to a baby, and then kill it. Sounded easy enough. He nodded his head.
“Glad to hear you’ll play along. The master will be pleased. I will go tell Lord Shiva.”
Hugo walked over to the cell mirror, which was only a sheet of polished metal bolted to the wall. He leaned against the sink and stared into it.
“The message has been delivered,” Hugo said to his reflection. “I can’t take it anymore.”
His reflection changed to an innocent and weak version of himself. It looked like a biker, still covered in tattoos, but his face looked nice and calm, like one of those rich lawyers who dressed up as a badass and cruised the highways during the weekend. The bad Hugo reached into the mirror, grabbed his reflection by his left ear and his right armpit, and yanked him through the mirror, body-slamming him onto the hard floor. The good Hugo arched his back and winced in pain.
“See you on the other side,” Hugo said to Savage Bear. Then he stuck his head through the liquefied glass of the mirror and climbed through.
Savage Bear looked down at the crumpled heap of innocence on his cell floor. Seeing a grown man look so utterly weak made him want to heave.
“Where am I?” the weak Hugo asked.
“House of damned,” Savage Bear answered.
The weak Hugo looked around, seeming to finally realize he was in prison.
“Why…why…why…am I here?” he asked.
“Get the fuck out of my cell,” Savage Bear ordered.
The weak Hugo looked at Savage Bear, his bottom lip trembling. He did as he was told, shuffling out into the world of the wild prison animals, baby step by baby step. Savage Bear walked over to his mirror and admired his reflection.
Chapter 4 - Let There Be Light
On the dark side of the mirror, Lisa rested on her back, with her knees up and her legs open. Gabe stood next to her, holding her hand and stroking her hair, saying any words he could think of to help ease her mind.
Segundo and Emma played doctor, doing everything Lisa and Gabe had told them to do, mostly stuff they’d seen on TV. Neither of them had gone to any sort of medical school, and since there’d never been a baby born on the dark side, neither Segundo nor Emma had any idea what it would be like delivering a baby.
Gabe was terrified, but he reminded himself that babies had been born since the beginning of time, and whether there was a doctor or not, the baby was going to come when it was time.
“Is everything okay?” Gabe asked Segundo, who was squatted down, with his elbows on his hips, staring at the opening between Lisa’s legs. “Segundo,” Gabe repeated. “I’m talking to you, man. Is everything okay?”
“Umm,” Segundo replied. “If it’s supposed to be opening and closing like the mouth of a snake trying to digest a rat, then yes…I think everything is okay.”
Emma slapped Segundo’s arm.
“You’re scaring them,” she said. “Yes, Gabe, everything is fine. The baby is on its way.”
***
Hawks stared at the flames that licked the night sky, fascinated by the glowing embers that separated from the pack and drifted in front of him. Lisa’s cries off in the distance bothered him more than he imagined they would.
The crackle of the fire and the painful wails coming from within the cabin reminded him of the night he first arrived on the dark side. He’d wrestled with his image for a short period of time in the hotel room, and then suddenly he’d felt himself get thrown through the mirror. The next thing he remembered was rolling across the dirt in the center of the Indian village, next to a dying fire.
Badly beaten, his spirit broken, Hawks had crawled through the village, searching for any sign of life. Everyone in the village was dead. Ten people had been slaughtered at the hands of his image, or so he’d suspected.
It was one body in particular that had crushed him. The mirror image of his wife, Savannah, was curled up inside one of the cabins. She’d been gutted. Her face had been unscathed and still looked as beautiful as his wife had looked on the other side of the mirror.
That night he saw the dead bodies of both his wife and her image, and that was a lot for any man to handle. He passed out over her lifeless body, and when he came to, he found himself draped over the back of a horse.
Bronc had explained to him later that he’d found him lying there in his fancy clothes and knew he was from the other side of the mirror. If he hadn’t rescued Hawks and had Emma stitch him up, he would’ve died there in the village, like everyone else. Since then he’d stayed with Bronc, Emma, and Twig until they’d stumbled upon Gabe, Lisa, and Haylay, barely surviving in their makeshift camp.
As a group they built what was now Sanctuary. Eventually Segundo, Nita, and Tania showed up, and ever since, they’d all been trying their best to live a new life and forget the old.
Nights like this brought back horrible memories, of the wife, brother, and grandfather he lost that night, and of the dark version of his wife he lost as well. Bronc had told him that his image’s name was Savage Bear. It was he who was responsible for her death, and the death of all the others in the village.
Hawks stared at the fire, afraid to close his eyes, because he knew what visions would be waiting for him there in the darkness. They were the same he saw so many nights while lying in bed.
Savannah with her brains being blown out in front of him, then her image with her guts being ripped open. The one woman he’d found hanging by her neck from a noose in one of the cabins, her dead husband lying on the floor under her, her bare toes scraping his stomach as her body swung back and forth, back and forth. The old lady, still sitting in her rocking chair, a knitting needle in her hands and a crooked smile on her face, while her neck seeped blood. How could one man do so much damage, to such an undeserving people?
Bronc had told him about his image. Savage Bear was an outcast, a heavy drinker who loved the orange powdery drug, coral. He lived on the outskirts with his wife, but Bronc’d had several run-ins with him whenever he’d visited the village to spend time with friends. Everyone in the village was somehow related to Savage Bear. The old lady in the rocking chair had been his mother. The woman dangling from the noose was his sister. The image of Savannah had been his wife, but they were separated. Bronc knew Savage Bear to be a mean, cold, angry young man, but never expected him to slaughter the entire family the way he did.
Sitting in front of the fire, Hawks thought of Savage Bear, and his blood boiled. He hated the heartless son of a bitch.
***
While Lisa cried out in her pain and Hawks sat silent in his, Twig and Tania were in the woods that surrounded the camp. They made out heavily, covered in sweat, grasping at each others’ clothes like wild animals.
Tania tugged at Twig’s belt, ripping it off and slapping his face with it. She enjoyed beating Twig, just a little. It was dominance over him and she was digging it. She hadn’t meant to split his lip, but Twig didn’t seem to mind as he licked the blood that formed at the corner of his mouth.
“God you are an animal,” he said.
“You’re taking too long,” Tania complained. “Give it to me, now. Before my parents find us!”
Lisa cried out, and Tania mimicked her, loving the opportunity to be loud in her passion.
Finally, Twig reached his hand up between her legs. He felt around clumsily, and Tania wondered if all men were as awkward as he was.
“You’re not wearing any panties,” he said.
“Not tonight,” she said with a wink of an eye.
Twig slid forward, pulled his pants down, and seemed
to be preparing himself for her. She wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing, but it quickly became clear he wasn’t well versed in the sexual arts. His hand fumbled around between her legs and then suddenly what she assumed was the head of his dick bumped against her thigh.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “Hurry up.”
She was eager, craving it even. She wasn’t sure what was wrong, but she felt hot, like fire ran through her veins, and she knew the only thing that would quench it was having Twig inside her.
“I’ll try to be gentle,” he said.